With Innovation Comes Power
Facebook, the center of our generation’s social network, is incredibly related to our Networks class in many ways. It is a perfect venue to study many of the core concepts of Networks such as central nodes and Strong Triadic Closure. As the Facebook network has grown to over a billion users, with many having hundreds of friends, Facebook post ranking in their NewsFeed has become crucial to their success. They weigh many factors such as time since post, connectivity to the friend, and whether you have seen the post before.
Hundreds of millions of users log into the site on a daily basis. These people rely on their Facebook NewsFeed to update them on the latest and most important things going on in their friends’ lives. Facebook post rank has risen in size, sophistication and importance to the point where their algorithm is almost as important as that of Google’s page rank. Many of the same factors such as connectivity and centrality to the network that appear in Google’s page rank also appear in Facebook’s post rank.
When Facebook ran an unannounced experiment where they purposely diluted some users’ feeds with ‘happy content’ and others’ with ‘sad content’ in order to study the effect of your friends’ post on your mood, they received heavy backlash. Facebook has an immense amount of power in choosing what they display in the NewsFeed. They have the eyes of millions of people on their content every day, and have developed algorithms that perform at an extremely high level. Purposely skewing these algorithms to emotionally manipulate users, without direct permission, is an abuse of power. This is a surprising breach from Facebook’s identity and does not in any way align with their mission or goals as a company.
Although this time the information went public, there is no guarantee that it will next time.
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/everything-you-need-to-know-about-facebooks-manipulative-experiment/